Country Music’s Digital Surprise
Pages: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

English Study

To begin planning the production approach for "When I See You Smile," I bought a copy of the Bad English version from the online RealPlayer Music Store. Here's a reminder of what the song sounds like:

• "When I See You Smile" (Bad English) (432KB MP3)

As you can hear, it's very '80s--orchestral in size, with prominent synths, lots of reverb, and huge drums. The question for me was how to make it sound fresh, make it sound like country, and not make it so different that we'd lose fans of the original. The approach I ended up choosing involved stretching each style towards the other and twisting them together a bit: Replace the rock synths and orchestral sounds with the instruments (and voices) of a country band, and use those country sounds to play parts that would normally be outside of country's conventions. In particular:

• Most of the synths would be replaced by acoustic and electric guitars, plus piano.
• Synth "pads" (sustaining washes of sound) would be replaced by human voices--real, not sampled.
• Steel guitar, which shares some characteristics with bowed instruments, would be used in ways reminiscent of a string section.

If we did it right, I thought we could come up with a sound that was both huge and organic.

I decided to work at Sonic Eden studio (then called Landshark), owned by engineer John Albani. John started the studio as a demo facility, and that's how I had used it many times. But I'd been so happy with the sound, and with John's excellent ears, that I wanted to try it for an album project. It happened that John was a good choice for this particular song for another reason, too: In the '80s, he was lead guitarist and a songwriter for Canadian metal queen Lee Aaron. (Coincidentally, I was then lead guitarist and songwriter with the Canadian new wave pop band Aceboy, though we didn't run into each other at the time.)

Sonic Eden merges organic warmth with high-tech production based on the Steinberg Nuendo digital audio workstation.